Obama, Business Leaders Inch Toward Rapprochement

By

Gerald F. Seib

Updated Feb. 5, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Much breath has been expended discussing whether President Barack Obama and Republican leaders can patch things up, even a little. Less noticed: A similar move is under way to try a bit of reconciliation between the White House and the business community.

The surest sign came in an exchange of letters in recent days between the president and Thomas Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization that was nearly in a state of open hostilities with the White House through much of last fall, particularly over health care. Intriguing as they are, those letters are but one of several indicators of a possible climate change.

Mr. Donohue lit the peace pipe by writing to Mr. Obama the day after the president's State of the Union address. His letter subtly sidestepped all the things on which the Chamber and the White House disagree—including taxes and climate change—and instead delineated the areas of possible common ground in 2010.

"To create jobs," Mr. Donohue wrote, "the Chamber and the American business community will support your goals of doubling exports in five years, expanding the use of nuclear power and offshore exploration for natural resources, implementing performance-based education reforms, improving worker training, and rebuilding our infrastructure."

There, Mr. Donohue seemed to be saying. That's what we can agree on.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel plucked the letter out of the flood the president receives daily, and arranged a personal response from Mr. Obama.

"So as we work to jump-start job creation, I look forward to working with you on proposals to provide tax credits to small business to hire new workers, to completely eliminate capital gains for small businesses and to provide incentives for all business, big and small, to jump-start capital investments by allowing them to immediately write off 50% of the cost of depreciable property," Mr. Obama wrote.

"While I set the goal of doubling exports over the next five years, only America's businesses can make this come about," the president wrote.

There, Mr. Obama seemed to be saying. That's where I need your help. Your Republican friends in Congress are belittling my proposals to help small business as insignificant or unhelpful, so I hope you'll push back to help get these things passed.

Mr. Donohue, who notes that the Chamber stood with the administration last year on economic-stimulus legislation and the financial-sector rescue, said in an interview that he wrote the president because "he stood up on what we have been talking about, which is job creation."

He also said he still hopes for more administration help on opening trade and easing export controls.

To be sure, the letters outline a limited patch of common ground: nuclear energy and some offshore oil drilling, infrastructure spending, education overhauls and small-business tax breaks. Still, finding even a small patch of common ground beats lobbing artillery shells back and forth across Lafayette Park, which separates the White House and the Chamber's headquarters.

The letters come amid some other signs of attempted rapprochement. For one, the Chamber helped the White House win Senate confirmation of a second term for Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Other moves are more symbolic. On Thursday, for example, Mr. Obama had lunch in the White House's Old Family Dining Room with a group of business leaders. And he has invited some corporate executives to join him to watch the Super Bowl at the White House this weekend, officials say.

Other signals are rhetorical. When the president spoke Wednesday to Senate Democrats, he had this to say: "We've got to be the party of business, small business and large business, because they produce jobs. We've got to be in favor of competition and exports and trade."

He went further. The president who somewhat famously told Republicans earlier in the week, "I am not an ideologue," told his party's senators they shouldn't be ideologues either.

"We've got to be nonideological about our approach to these things. We've got to make sure that our party understands that, like it or not, we have to have a financial system that is healthy and functioning, so we can't be demonizing every bank out there," Mr. Obama said.

This approach, of course, partly reflects the White House's need of new allies in a world in which Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts (a phrase that still rings strange in Washington) has erased Democrats' filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

But the moves also reflect a parallel realization among some business leaders that a descent into open combat with the White House, class warfare and populist bomb-throwing in Washington isn't in their interest either.

Both sides seem to recognize there's an opportunity, for now, to set aside the health-care debate of 2009, given that legislation is stalled in Congress. (In fact, the prospect that an end to the debate would allow for more cooperation with the business community might be one of the silver linings for the White House if the health bill dies just short of the finish line.)

Above all, the two sides seem to recognize the administration's current war of words with the financial industry needn't be expanded into a confrontation with the business community as a whole—which, after all, is a larger and quite different species.

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